STREETSCAPES/The Octagon on Roosevelt Island; A Once-Grand 1839 Tower Is Given a New Life

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: January 23, 2005

Correction Appended

THIRTY years ago, the Octagon tower on Roosevelt Island seemed like a multi-sided peg in a round-hole world, a weird, purposeless, leftover fragment of the New York City Lunatic Asylum, built in 1839 on what was then Blackwell's Island. Now, after its wings were demolished and it has deteriorated to a point just short of collapse, this once-grand building -- or at least what's left of it -- is being brought back from the brink of ruin.

In the 1830's, the city's Board of Alderman decided to build a humane refuge for the insane on Blackwell's Island. Although near the growing city, the island was Nimby-proof -- it wasn't near anyone's backyard, and the surrounding waters were useful as a moat for isolating paupers, criminals and smallpox patients, all of whom were soon housed on the island.

The asylum's architect, Alexander Jackson Davis, famous now for the picturesque villas and cottages he designed, developed a plan for an expansive structure in the shape of a squarish C, with the ends reaching the river and forming an enclosed court. Except for the bars on the windows, it could have been a spectacular seaside hotel, or a complex of quarters for military officers.

Only the northern half of the C was built, with two 250-foot arms at right angles joined by a large four-story-high octagon, 80 feet wide, with central offices, storerooms and the residence of the physician in charge. The three-story wings were low and severe, double-loaded corridors with 6-by-10-foot rooms running down each side.

They and the octagonal section were built of blue-gray schist -- a moody, variable stone -- quarried on the island. The octagonal section had a squat cupola, and the side wings had loggias with Tuscan-style columns. The entire assembly was austere and grand, venturing even on the bleak. But compared with previous examples, the new building was a utopian effort in the use of architecture to improve the human condition.

The Lunatic Asylum was still new when Charles Dickens visited the institutions on ''Long Island, or Rhode Island, I forget which,'' as he put it in his ''American Notes'' of 1842. It was indeed Blackwell's Island, and he thought the building handsome but found its inmates distressing: ''Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.''

Dr. M.H. Ranney, the superintendent, counted 497 patients in his annual report for 1849 -- 91 had died of cholera in one sudden outbreak between June 10 and July 26, most within a few hours after its onset. But Dr. Ranney was upbeat about the environment ''away from the excitement of the city'' with ''a pure invigorating atmosphere and, in addition, the most beautiful scenery on every side -- all of these tend to remove despondency, establish the health, and restore the reason,'' he wrote. Dr. Ranney was proud of the availability of religious services and of the asylum's library, especially praising the works of Sir Walter Scott. But there is no mention in his reports of what would now be called treatment, which relied mostly on rest.

An 1866 account in Harper's New Monthly Magazine reported that patients caught lobsters and fish, played quoits, built furniture and grew their own vegetables, including 200 bushels of tomatoes a year. A recent improvement was the adoption of navy blue clothes for males, calico gowns for women -- previously, patients had worn striped clothing like that of the nearby penitentiary inmates. One woman thought herself a china teapot, sitting for hours each day with her right arm as a spout and her left the handle, but always in fear she would be knocked over.

In 1878, the city put a new ornamental stone stairway and a slate-covered dome on top of the octagonal building, mitigating the chaste severity of the design. The asylum relocated to Wards Island in the 1890's, and was succeeded by Metropolitan Hospital, which in turn left around 1950.

After that, the asylum building was in marginal use. In the 1960's, New York State took over much of what had become Roosevelt Island for its visionary housing settlement. A memorandum in the files of the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted an agreement permitting the state to demolish Alexander Jackson Davis's wings but salvaging enough stone to reface the scars left on what was by then known as the Octagon, with the idea that it would be rebuilt as a sort of folly.

The wings were taken down, but nothing ever came of a plan to preserve the Octagon, and indeed it fell into ruin, with multiple fires and collapses, becoming just a shell.

Last year, the architect-developer Bruce Redman Becker, after long negotiations, started construction on a new 13-story apartment complex with 500 rental units, connected to the Octagon, which will be used for the main entry area, offices and common rooms.

In a perfect world, the original wings would have survived the state's planning for Roosevelt Island, which had little tolerance for the nuances of older buildings. The silly stairway and dome applied to the Octagon in the 1870's -- which Davis bitterly protested at the time, and which trivialized his chaste design -- would be removed, instead of completely recreated for the present project.

In that world, the entire complex -- aged, worn, battered by the slings and arrows of time -- would be chastely refitted on the inside; its sweeping lines would reach out to the swirling eddies of the river and yield a sense of the antiquity of New York and the vision of those who wanted to elevate the treatment of the insane.

Photos: A HUMANE REFUGE -- A drawing of the Octagon tower, part of the New York City Lunatic Asylum, in 1853, on Blackwell's Island.; A PLACE TO LIVE -- A rendering of the Octagon as part of a new apartment complex that is now under construction. (Photos by above: Office for Metropolitan History; below, Becker & Becker with Kevin Kennon Architects)

Graphs: ''Mortgage Rates'' shows mortgage rates for the New York region since 2002.

(Sources by HSH Associates)

Correction: February 20, 2005, Sunday
The Streetscapes column on Jan. 23, about the Octagon tower, built in 1839 as part of the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Roosevelt Island, misstated the time when its architect, Alexander Jackson Davis, protested changes in its design. It was in 1838, when alterations were made during construction, not the 1870's, when further changes were made.